I was born and raised in Ohio and attended THE Ohio State University majoring in finance. After college, I moved to NYC to work on Wall Street partially motivated by a paper I wrote about LTCM and partially because Ohio didn’t really have finance jobs that I found exciting (ex. selling insurance). I spent about 10 years in NYC, working in a variety of capacities for multi-billion dollar long/short equity hedge funds John A. Levin & Co. and Clovis Capital. I went to grad school nights at Columbia University (applied statistics) and worked for Victor Niederhoffer for a brief period while in grad school.
After graduating, I moved to the US Virgin Islands and became a quantitative macro strategist for WILTW which is Kiril Sokoloff/13D’s flagship publication. I then moved to Chicago where I became the CIO of the R.J. O’Brien family office and their CTA. My job mostly entailed designing systematic trading strategies of all shapes and sizes and screening external managers and strategies for potential allocations. During this time, I started to study and write papers on traders mainly to benefit my own trading/system design.
The paper I wrote about Michael Marcus resulted in speaking with Jack Schwager which ultimately led to co-authoring the upcoming Market Wizards book. I share the whole story in detail in the upcoming book.
Currently, I am back in Ohio to be near family. In addition to writing the Wizards book, I started an RIA/CTA that leverages my free research on great traders – the goal is to generate much better risk adjusted returns, compared to buy and hold, as measured by MAR ratio and volatility. I also publish research on secular trends in stocks and write Market Meditations which is where I share various thoughts on trading and markets. Finally, I do trade for myself using a discretionary approach that leverages all of my research.
I think of myself as part writer, part trader, part system designer, part money manager, part researcher, and part market strategist. This sounds like a lot, but these various pursuits complement each other well and much can be accomplished when you're passionate about something.